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Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Oh geeze Comic-Con. Why you gotta have all this stuff coming out right now? Quick round up of Comic-Con and other things, mostly gathered, curated and analyzed by the lovely Once Upon a Blog.

The Fairy Tale Comic-Con Line Up
First, fairy tales were well represented at Comic Con this year! Sure you had OUAT and it's spin off, and Grimm, and the CW's Beauty and the Beast, but you also had some beautiful fairy tale artists featured, the disturbing toy series Ever After High, and the sexy and gory Grimm Fairy Tales animated series which I don't know whether to squee about, or shake my fist in feminist rage. Click the link to see the rest!

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Once Upon a Time in Wonderland
OUATW..which is a weird acronym....and it's 19 minutes of footage shown at Con seems to have had a positive response from Io9. "Gorgeous, fun, and scary" is certainly more than I had hoped for! Especially with the confectionery CGI in OUAT. (Click the link for details of the footage). It now is a mash up of Alice in Wonderland and Aladdin, which are two worlds I never would have thought to put together. Naveen Andrews (Sayid from Lost, yes, but I do love him as Balraj in Bride and Prejudice: click to see him singing and dancing) is going to play Jafar. This means that, as promicing as the premise of OUATW is, diverging from the Disney Alice, we will definitely still see Disney influence in the other worlds they promise. Sadface. See more of my sadface in the next item.

In regular OUAT, our heroes and villains have all banded together to save Henry. Why? I do not know. I feel like they need to stop hanging their seasons on a character that no one really cares about. Peter Pan will be non-traditional, as we have seen bits of, which is thrilling! Way to not just tell the Disney version! Though we do have Rufio as one of the lost boys. And we have this little gem:

Why you gotta be like that, OUAT? It's still the same schizophrenic show: half dark new spins on fairy tales (shadow Peter Pan, Little Red as the Wolf) and half Disney advertisement. I wouldn't be so frustrated with it if it didn't simply reinforce that the Disney versions are the only versions of these tales. Of course the Little Mermaid is a redhead named Ariel. Isn't that how it is in the original? Grumble, grumble.

Once Upon a Blog rises to the occasion yet again, and digs up some really juicy stuff about RDJ's Pinocchio: the conflicts in development and speculation on the content of the movie. Thanks for the shout out, friend! I only have the Disney version of Pinocchio for reference (hypocrite much, Megan?) and sad to say I remember not liking it very much. But looking back on simply the plot itself, there is so much to mine about what it means to be a person, father/son relationships, giving in to temptation, selflessness, all of that. Once Upon a Blog supplements the analysis with really beautiful illustrations by Roberto Innocenti that highlight a darker dimension to Pinocchio that I never new existed.

At last! An outside-the-box fairy tale movie adaptation! Here, I cannot quibble with deviation from the main story, because they are using the Snow White tale to inform a new narrative...IN SPACE! The movie is said to be "the Snow White fairytale fused with Japanese pop culture in a sci-fi and futuristic mythological masterpiece" directed by the Wachowski’s (The Matrix and Cloud Atlas). So you know it is going to be trippy and awesome.

"Jupiter Jones (Kunis) was born under a night sky, with signs predicting that she was destined for great things. Now grown, Jupiter dreams of the stars but wakes up to the cold reality of a job cleaning toilets and an endless run of bad breaks. Only when Caine (Tatum), a genetically engineered ex-military hunter, arrives on Earth to track her down does Jupiter begin to glimpse the fate that has been waiting for her all along – her genetic signature marks her as next in line for an extraordinary inheritance that could alter the balance of the cosmos."

Channing Tatum is a...ahem... "hybrid wolf and human. And half albino." That is crazy and awesome and I love it. And Sean Bean is in it too! 50 bucks says he'll die.

The design stuff looks amazing too! "The costumes and makeup on some of the extras look like 17th century French royalty that had their clothes tailored in Southeast Asia. " They claim to be doing filmic things that have never been done before, and the stunts are all real, not CGI. Not sure I am cool with the, "I want you to have sex with me in an alley" promo images, but we shall see! Click the link for more info, pictures, and Once Upon a Blog's thoughts.